Make your own GIF

I recently discovered this cool website that can create GIF’s from video clips really easily.

Why you might need it

I was writing a blog post recently and I wanted to include a YouTube clip that the blog was based on. I did want to show the whole thing at some point in the blog, but I also just wanted to highlight small sections of it.

Using Gifs.com I found the whole process for creating a gif to be actually incredibly easy. The website takes you through the process step by step, you can add comments, images, etc. at certain points. You can choose the length of your gif, whether you want it to have sound, etc. If you have the free account you have to put up with their watermark on your gif but it’s not too intrusive and with a monthly cost of $7.99 pm for an account, I didn’t feel it was worth it for the amount I would use it. If you’re going to be a heavy user though you might feel it’s worth it.

How to

I’ll take you through the process step by step here.

1. After a quick sign-up process you are taken to a page where you paste in your video URL.

2. You’re taken automatically to the new screen where you can edit your GIF, including changing the length, cropping the size, placing captions or stickers across the screen, etc. all really easily. You can take some time to make it perfect or you can just do a simple time grab.

3. Once you’re done editing your gif click Create Gif in the top right corner and you’re now at this page where you name and tag your gif. You can also choose to tag it as not safe for work and whether to have sound on or not. When ready, click Next.

4. Here you go, your GIF is ready to share. And it even helpfully gives you a couple of options on how to share, depending on where you’re sharing it to.

5. And here it is. My lovely Muppety GIF. What do you think?

Another handy hint for sharing YouTube videos

Another handy little hint for sharing YouTube videos is that you can share a video and start it from any point, not just the very beginning. Run the video until the point you want to start it then click the share button.

You’ll see at the bottom of the field of the pop-up window a small checkbox to start the video from that point. The link it provides for you to copy will start the video from that point. Just copy and paste and you can see below how well it works.

So, what do you think about how easy it is to create gifs? Do you have your own favourite website or app that you want to share with us?